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Latest Comments by Kithop
NVIDIA releases the 465.19.01 Beta driver for Linux, looks like more Wayland work coming
30 Mar 2021 at 4:25 pm UTC

Still waiting on nVidia to release some kind of firmware support to the Nouveau [External Link] team for GM20x and newer, personally, but I'm not holding my breath after this many years.

New OBS Plugin Offers Game Capture Solution on Wayland (for Vulkan renderers)
26 Mar 2021 at 7:08 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: KithopSo I think that's why EGL comes into play, here.
I don't think Wayland is tied to EGL? Wayland is a protocol, it's not really tied to a specific implementation. It can work with WSI.

The Vulkan WSI (Window System Interface) is a set of API calls serve a similar purpose as EGL does for OpenGL ES or GLX for OpenGL. Vulkan WSI includes support for Wayland from day one: VK_USE_PLATFORM_WAYLAND_KHR. Vulkan clients can run on unmodified Wayland servers, including Weston, GENIVI LayerManager, Mutter / GNOME Shell, Enlightenment, and more. The WSI allows applications to discover the different GPUs on the system, and display the results of GPU rendering to a window system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protocol) [External Link]

So that's why I was asking why they are using EGL instead of let's say WSI.
I'm not a developer, so I can't say I've looked at it in any sort of depth, but my hunch is that Vulkan + WSI would be used in e.g. a game wanting to draw its Vulkan backend to Wayland, without using XWayland as a path (i.e. a Vulkan + Wayland native game), while EGL is being used for 'normal day-to-day applications', i.e. OBS, to render *its* window and preview to Wayland.

I'm guessing that OBS could totally be written to support WSI, but that means having OBS itself use Vulkan to render its UI directly, and I have a feeling it's abstracting that out through Qt for the most part, so this is a function of 'OBS supports EGL output but not necessarily Vulkan (yet)', separate from whether the game you're *inputting* is on Vulkan or not. But again, just a semi-educated guess here. :tongue:

New OBS Plugin Offers Game Capture Solution on Wayland (for Vulkan renderers)
26 Mar 2021 at 5:53 pm UTC

Quoting: ShmerlIsn't EGL OpenGL specific? I thought Vulkan is using WSI for example.
According to Wikipedia: [External Link]
  • The Wayland display server protocol uses EGL.[8] It is implemented in a way that Wayland clients will draw directly to the framebuffer using EGL.

So I think that's why EGL comes into play, here.

New OBS Plugin Offers Game Capture Solution on Wayland (for Vulkan renderers)
26 Mar 2021 at 3:04 pm UTC

It's funny - I *just* switched over to trying to daily drive Wayland this week, and I found this capture plugin pretty much the next day. I heard of PipeWire and xdg-desktop-portal after and am going to look into those as well, personally, but I liked that this almost gives us parity with the 'Game Capture' plugin for OBS on Windows.

Microsoft reportedly have Discord in their sights to acquire
23 Mar 2021 at 4:54 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: GuestNeat, hadn't heard of that one. One advantage Tox [External Link] has over it though is decentralization and possibly anonymity. You don't have to use anyone's specific server, i.e. everyone is a server since it's purely p2p.

Once the next major release of toxcore is out, group chats will have file sharing, so it will be more Element-like in that regard. But cool that there seem to be some other secure options out there. ^n.n^
Yeah, taking a real quick look at that, it reminds me that I've also played around with Jami [External Link] in the past (previously GNU Ring), but honestly the thing I like about Matrix is that it is a bit more persisent/organized in that you can administer a server, moderate it, etc. - I'm thinking more for organizing a gaming guild, or a convention... something that blurs the lines between business-focused Slack/Teams, but with better voice UI.

Just doing ad-hoc group chats, yeah - that's got a few more options, thankfully.

Microsoft reportedly have Discord in their sights to acquire
23 Mar 2021 at 4:02 pm UTC

I'm still waiting and hoping someone with the dev skills I don't have figures out how to get persistent hop in/out voice channels on Matrix + Element, global hotkeys for push-to-talk / mute, etc. so it can cover and replace Discord's use case without splitting people up between the text chat 'community' in one app and voice via Mumble in another. Plus, connecting to and lurking in several different Mumble servers at once (not necessarily joining a voice chat) is.. not easy?

It's been something heavily discussed on the Element (formerly Riot) issue tracker since something like 2016 or 2017 I think, but their focus is on emulating/replacing Slack, so it doesn't get traction in favour of more business-focused features, since they're paying the bills for them.

Linux hardware vendor System76 introduces the Thelio Mira desktop
11 Mar 2021 at 6:37 pm UTC Likes: 7

I didn't really have any huge issue with either the old radeon or even proprietary fglrx drivers back in the day, and it's not that nVidia's are broken or unworkable (unless you like to keep up with kernel development)... but AMD invested a ton into mainlining the amdgpu drivers, while nVidia still refuses to release the firmware that would allow nouveau to enable reclocking.

Any other system builder targeting Windows, sure, nVidia is more popular. But for a Linux-first integrator pushing for openness, it's just odd to me to not even offer the equivalent hardware that doesn't require a binary blob. I'm not even saying not to sell or even default to nVidia if that's what they want, but I suppose there might be a way to sweet talk them into letting you order a GPU-less system and then BYO card.

Linux hardware vendor System76 introduces the Thelio Mira desktop
11 Mar 2021 at 5:55 pm UTC Likes: 5

It still baffles me that they're only offering various nVidia GPUs for their desktops - aside from the fact that no one seems to have much stock of anything, this is right up my alley of 'I would like to replace my aging desktop with something that supports Linux out of the box better'. I used to have a 1st and 2nd-gen Mac Pro tower, and those cases were amazing to work in by standards of the day.

Even if the Radeon options were just greyed out for now with 'out of stock', it's just so odd to push for openness everywhere else in the system...and then only offer nVidia's binary-blob-driver cards as GPUs.

Linux lands on Mars with Perseverance and Ingenuity
22 Feb 2021 at 4:52 pm UTC Likes: 10

On the whole 'oh, it's an old PowerPC 750 on Perserverance', yes.

It's an extremely radiation hardened, military grade PPC750 (aka what Apple would call a 'G3'), and it's the same as previous Mars rovers and a number of I believe orbiters, other missions, etc.

Reliability in deep space is a huge concern, radiation is a huge deal (remember the 'cosmic ray bit flips'?), and it's a now heavily tested platform. I can't fault them for going with what they know has a well proven track record and reusing previous rover tech. Same reason it's VxWorks instead of Linux.

But yeah, it's not as dense as a modern (ish) Snapdragon 801 ARM SoC from 2014, and for a specific experiment where the performance/watt...per gram is a make-or-break, and even its potential for failure doesn't affect the main rover, it makes sense.

VxWorks isn't available for the Snapdragon 801, apparently, hence Linux, and here we are.

Stadia to see more than 100 games through 2021
14 Feb 2021 at 6:18 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: psycho_driver
Quoting: KithopBut for a vocal 0.1% running that Frankenstein's monster of a tricked out Gentoo build?
Hey, why'd you have to bring me into this conversation?

Seriously though, I don't think I've ever complained about a game not working on my distro. The only game I can even think of that I just couldn't get to work at all that a lot of other people didn't seem to be having problems with was Payday.
:whistle: *eyes his own distro icon* I, uh, joke from a place of love.

And personal experience. :grin:

Heck my issues with probably whatever the heck I've done to my system in Gentoo are just... Wayland + Qt being a butt and disappearing context/menu bar menus instantly, keeping me on X11 for now. But that's fine... it's fine... fine!...

*starts adding various -9999 ** entries to package.accept_keywords and compiling from git HEAD in the hopes of maybe the bug being fixed*

...fine...all fine...

(this is the price I pay for wanting to avoid systemd like the plague, I guess)